Meanwhile the FBI had reported on a new ritual-murder sect. The adherents believed they were “fast-forwarding” their victims to a point where they would be revived by the black hole miners or some other group of downstreamers and live in peace and harmony, forever in the future.

And so on. More and more she got the sense that she was stuck in the middle of an immature species’ crisis of adolescence.

Which shaped her view on the decision that faced her.

Personally Maura had severe doubts there would be anything to find on Cruithne, except for ancient dusty rock and Dan Ys-tebo’s peculiar squid. What was more important was the symbolism of the military action.

The government would act to show it was still in control of events: that it was not paralyzed by the Carter prediction, that even Reid Malenfant was not beyond its jurisdiction. It seemed to Maura that this was what Americans always strove to do: to take a lead, to take control, to do something.

And that was the subtext, the real purpose behind the military response. The think tank report argued that the resonance of action was essential now to restore the social cohesion of a wired-up planet.

And Maura, reluctantly, found she agreed.

Sorry, Malenfant, she thought.

She registered her recommendation, and turned, with relief, to other matters.

Reid Malenfant:

Removed from the swirling currents of humanity, the crew of the

Gerard K O ‘Neill sailed into darkness.

After just a couple of days, though Earth’s clouds and blue-green oceans were still visible, its disc had shrunk to the apparent size of the Moon from the ground. And the next day, it was smaller still. It would take ninety days of such phenomenal traveling to reach Cruithne, tracing out its own peculiar orbit all of forty million miles from home.

The celestial mechanics of the ship’s trajectory were complex.

Both Earth and Cruithne rounded the sun in about a year. Cruithne, tracing its ellipse, moved a tad faster. It meant that the O’Neill had to leap between two moving rocks, like a kid hopping from one roundabout to another. After the impulse given it by its booster throw, the ship was coasting through its own orbit independently of the Earth, a rounded ellipse that cut inside Earth’s path.

By the time they reached Cruithne the ship would be around twelve degrees in advance of Earth: twelve out of three-sixty, a thirtieth of the circumference of the planet’s orbit.

Malenfant liked to think he would be a couple of weeks ahead in time of the folks back home.

He treated the first bouts of motion sickness with Scop-Dex; he was glad when he could wean his crew off that because of the drowsiness it caused. They all suffered from low-G problems like the facial puffiness and nasal irritation caused by body-fluid redistribution. They were peeing too much as a result of their bodies’ confusion over this, and their hearts, with less work to do, were relaxing. And so on. Despite the artificial G and the exercise regime he imposed, their muscles were wasting, their hearts were shrinking, and their bones were leaching away.

It was all anticipated and well understood, of course. But that didn’t help make it easier to accept. Most of their decondi-tioning, in fact, had happened in the first nine hours in space, when they were still inside the orbit of the Moon. And after the nominal mission, after two hundred days in space, they would all be walking with a stick for months.

So it goes.

He kept Cornelius and Emma busy by cross-training them on the medical equipment. There was simple stuff like cardio-pulmonary resuscitation procedures, how to administer elec-troshock paddles, the use of chemicals like sodium bicarb. He gave them familiarization training on the drugs the ship carried, along with blood products. There were more grisly exercises, such as emergency tracheotomy and how to secure an intravenous catheter (the fat saphenous veins of the inner thigh were the best bet).

Of course he was no medic himself. He relied heavily on recordings and softscreen simulations to keep him on the right track.

But both Cornelius and Emma were intelligent; they both soon figured out the subtext of their training, which was that in the event of any real emergency there was little that could be done. A single serious injury would likely exhaust their medical supplies. And even if the patient, whichever unlucky sap it was, could be stabilized long enough to be kept alive and brought home, the others would have to nurse a nonfunctioning invalid all the way back to Earth.

Malenfant didn’t share with the others the training he’d gotten for himself on euthanasia, or on how to conduct a scientifically and legally valid autopsy.

During those first weeks they stayed healthy enough, luckily.

But once the adrenaline-rush excitement of the launch and the novelty of the mission wore off, all three of the adults — himself included — came crashing down into a feeling of intense isolation. He had expected this. He’d gotten some psychological training, based mainly on Russian experience, on long-duration spaceflight. Cornelius, for example, seemed locked in a bubble world of his own, his odd, smoothed-over personality cutting him off from the others like a second spacesuit. Malenfant left him alone as much as possible.

The general depression seemed to be hitting Emma hardest, however.

Oddly, when he looked into her eyes, it sometimes seemed as if she weren’t there at all, as if there were only a fragment of the Emma he knew, looking out at him, puzzled. How did I get here? It was understandable. He had, after all, shanghaied her, utterly without warning.

It would help if there were something to fill up her time, here on the O ‘Neill. But there was no real work for her to do beyond the chores and the training. He had softbooks, of course, but he’d only brought along technical manuals, a few books for the kid… Not a novel in the whole damn memory, and not even a yellowing hardcopy paperback. It would be easy enough to have stuff up-loaded from Earth, of course, but although the reports and telemetry he downloaded daily were surely being picked up by the NASA deep-space people, nobody down there seemed inclined to talk back to him.

He tried to handle his own deep sense of guilt.

He’d felt he needed to bring her along, on a whole series of levels. He still felt like that. But it would, after all, have been easy to push her away, there in the critical moments in the Mo-jave. To have kept from stealing her life from her.

If not for his Secret, maybe they’d be a little more open with each other. Of course, if not for the Secret, they wouldn’t be here at all.

But what was done was done.

Anyhow he’d refused to waste processor capacity on e-therapy programs, or any of that other modern crap that he regarded as mind-softening junk, despite recommendations from a slew of “experts” during the mission planning. The truth is, he knew, there were no experts, because nobody had gone out as far as this before. They would just have to cope, learn as they went along, support each other, as explorers always had.

He did worry about the kid, though. Even though Michael spooked him half to death. Wherever that came from, it surely wasn’t the kid’s fault…

Flight in deep space was, after all, utterly strange — even for Malenfant, who felt as if he’d spent his whole life preparing for this.

It was possible to forget, sometimes, that they were locked up here in this tiny metal bubble, with nothing out there save for a few lumps of floating rock that came to seem less and less significant the farther they receded from Earth.

But most times, everything felt strange.

If he walked too rapidly across the meatware deck, he could feel the Coriolis cutting in, a ghostly sideways push that made him stagger. Even when he washed or took a drink, the water would move around the bowl in huge languid waves, pulsing like some sticky, viscous oil. If he immersed his hands it felt like water always had, but it clung to his flesh in great globules and ribbons, so that he had to scrape it off and chase it back into the bowl.